7 Trial Lawyer • Fall 2022 at first glance, looks familiar, a bustling city. Keep looking and you won’t find any streets resembling SE Powell, 82nd Avenue or Portland’s other high crash corridors. There is no God-given right to drive fast through neighborhoods. We can achieve the same change here. We’re not doing it You may have heard transportation agencies in Oregon are already adopting Vision Zero. ODOT adopted a Vision Zero mission statement in its 2016 statewide safety plan. (I was on the committee). Also in 2016, Portland City Council adopted a detailed Vision Zero plan. However, little has changed on the ground. Few ODOT highways and very few of the major streets in Portland where most of the bad crashes occur implement Vision Zero principles. As a result, crash trends continue in the wrong direction. Fatalities have increased 42% statewide and tripled (from 21 to 63) in Portland since 2014. Rather than rethink its approach, ODOT simply rolled back its safety goals in its 2021 updated safety plan, which remains toothless and largely unfunded. Portland’s incremental improvements to a handful of streets have been dwarfed by a growing mismatch between legacy arterial streets conducive to high speed and the people and neighborhoods they are supposed to serve. Streets that used to be farm-to-market are still designed and operated like rural highways, despite now bisecting neighborhoods full of businesses, schools, churches and homes. At risk If you are an average American, you and your family members each have a 1 in 200 risk of dying in a traffic crash. That leaves few unaffected. However, the overall numbers mask a disproportionate burden on particular communities. For example, in Portland, people living east of 82nd Avenue are 2.5 times more likely to die as pedestrians compared to their counterparts in the rest of the city. East Portland is where the city and ODOT continue to operate many streets through neighborhoods with features that are known to make those streets dangerous. Multiple, wide lanes with high posted and actual speeds. No signals or physical features, speed cameras or other enforcement to achieve safe speeds. Inadequate or missing sidewalks. No separation for people on bikes. Substandard street lighting and few safe crossings. It also is where more people of color and people with low incomes live, and these groups are disproportionately crash victims. Crashes and their ripple effects are an additive trauma on top of challenges accessing good healthcare, education and jobs and being able to connect with nature. As part of my volunteer work with nonprofit Oregon Walks, we collected information and reviewed police reports for all 48 pedestrian fatalities in Portland from 2017 through 2019. We found that 21% of Portlanders killed as pedestrians were experiencing homelessness. That is perhaps ten times the risk others face. The city does not treat tents as “residences” for the purpose of providing (even temporarily) the safety features of residential streets, such as 20 mph speeds. That means if you live in a tent, there’s a good chance you have to cross lanes of high speed traffic with no lighting or crosswalk to get to and from where you live. Future litigation The most powerful example of the legal impact for all this comes from the highest court of New York. Anthony Turturro, age 12, rode his bicycle across a four-lane highway at night. A car traveling at nearly twice the speed limit struck him, causing severe injuries. Residents had complained of “racetrack” conditions for years. The court upheld a verdict placing 40% of the fault on the city. New York and Oregon have substantially the same standards for discretionary See Vision Zero p 8
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